European Tour

So I have been on the road again this week. First stop was Germany where I was speaking at the JAX conference. The buzz and energy around Eclipse is huge in Germany. Based on a show of hands, at least 90% of the crowd at JAX are using Eclipse for their Java development.

Germany is now the proud home of the world’s first Eclipse print magazine. The EclipseMagazin current edition is focused on using the Rich Client Platform, along with a preview of Eclipse 3.1. There are also articles on AspectJ and developing Python applications using Eclipse.

Today I was in Paris speaking to the Java Club here. Along with me were presentations from BEA, Ilog, Awoma, Versant, Omondo and ObjectWeb. It was certainly pretty cool to see this mix of large and small companies talk about the products they have been building with Eclipse.

Vladimir Varnica of Omondo really helped to get this event pulled together. Omondo is a pretty interesting company in that it is an Eclipse “pure play” venture. Not only are their EclipseUML Studio products built on Eclipse, but in a way their company is named after Eclipse. When Vlad and his team-mates wanted to start their company in 2002 they were searching for a name. There was a solar eclipse that year, so they searched for geographic landmarks which were under the full eclipse. And voila, Omondo it was. Now that’s a company dedicated to Eclipse!